The Adventures of Chester: Chaos in the Littorals

Wretchard's latest post at Belmont Club is The Far Line of Sand in which he tracks the development of future naval forces and deduces a possible outcome:

If form follows function the shape of the 21st century US Navy suggests that the "dark-green ... almost black" coastlines of the Third World will again become a theater of operations with this fundamental difference: areas that 19th century Europeans once sought to penetrate are now localities that need to be contained. No longer are arms being landed on those whispering coasts in hopes of conquest. The flows now go the other way. Today they must be blockaded against the outflow of weapons, armed gangs and multitudes of desperate people bent on escape from their misery. The USN by restructuring itself in response to the logical implications of terrorism, is anticipating a crisis that, to use Thomas Barnett's terminology, the "Core" governments have yet to face: how to bring freedom, prosperity and functionality to the "Non-Integrating Gap".

I think Wretchard is right on the money, but don't want inland operations to be neglected in our concept of the future. As he writes in the comments to the post:

I've often wondered whether it would be possible to write history, not from newspaper clippings, but from a time lapse analysis of the world's militaries. Like watching a silent movie and deducing the story from the action. On the principle of observing, not what men say but what men do.

Keeping that same idea in mind, we might examine what the land forces are doing too. A past post examined the American Enterprise Institute's conference, The Future of the United States Marine Corps [for some reason, the AEI website is not responding right now, but I have a printed copy of the transcript]. Here is an excerpt from a presentation about one possible conception of the future of the Marine Corps:

This would be a Marine Corps that'd be going back and working within its historical legacy of small wars, in essence, embracing what I would call the "second small wars era," which is how one could define the future environment.

I remember General Krulak, several years ago, talked about the future of warfare, you know, we'd be focusing on the stepchild, the stepchildren of Chechnya, and I would just extend that to it would be the stepchildren of Fallujah, would be the things we'd be focusing on, and that would include extensive urban combat.

We'd be prepared for the savage wars of peace that Max has written so eloquently about. The Marine Corps would not become a contributor--right now we have our little toe, you know, at SOCOM, and there's arguments for maybe sticking a leg in--but this'd be a Marine Corps that might be the major component to SOCOM or at least make a contribution of at least 30,000 Marines to that particular command.

General Mattis, in charge of writing doctrine for the Corps, has even more to say on this topic, that of small wars and our handling of them in the future:

But we've got to have people who are comfortable operating in austere, very complex environments where firepower is not the primary means to victory and you can see some of the things we're looking at there that allow us to transform the Marine Corps to make it even more relevant to what the nation needs from right now. We do see the Army, the Special Operations Forces, and the Marines as perhaps comprising a new triad. Remember the old triad to make certain we didn't go into nuclear war were strategic bombers, you know, land-based missles and submarines, of course, our at sea with the missiles on them.

We, to confront this new enemy, there may be a new triad that we need to put together.

Another member of the conference, Mike Vickers, a former Green Beret and CIA operations officer, had this to add:

Now as far as controlling terrain, which relates to this, I thik the problem that we see in Iraq, and Afghanistan, really may be an anomaly in the long-term war on terrorism, in the sense that we overthrew two governments and we're now trying to make sure those places don't go bad.

But the long-term problem is really shoring up lots of governments across a global landscape. As I mentioned, there are cells in some 55, 60 countries, there are insurgencies in 18, and so the only -- and they swim in a sea of people, remember all the Mao stuff, of 1.2 billion people, including lots of folks in Europe where the problem is getting worse.

And so the idea that you can do this by physically controlling -- with any amount of U.S. forces -- is ludicrous to me.

I mean, the idea that you -- the long-term GWOT problem will be working with locals in smaller groups, to make sure that problems don't rise to a certain level, and so the terrain we're trying to control, in a sense, is really global and the only way to do that is with an indirect approach and with this low visibility but persistent and culturally sensitive presence.

Compared with the picture of the future of the Navy that Wretchard offers, these concepts of land forces working in small groups, decentralized, in culturally and linguistically sensitive ways, are complimentary.

Two notes: first, such decentralized and small land forces could be used in two ways, either at their own initiative, or at the explicit direction of policymakers. They can be used to keep a lid on things, to keep local conditions from reaching a certain state, as Vickers suggests, or they may embark on wholesale change in the areas in which they operate. The choices they make, or are forced to make, may form much of the future of history in many parts of the world.

The second note is the difference in mentality that these operating conditions requires on the part of the soldier or Marine, whether professional or reservist. T.R. Fehrenbach wrote in his history of the Korean War, This Kind of War [via GooglePrint] about the difference between the kinds of war that soldiers thought they were to do in Korea, and what they actually did, and the effects on the populace at large.

Reservists and citizen soldiers stand ready, in every free nation, to stand to the colors and die in holocaust, the big war. Reservists and citizen-soldiers remain utterly reluctant to die in anything less. None want to serve on the far frontiers, or to maintain lonely, dangerous vigils on the periphery of Asia . . . However repugnant the idea may be to liberal societies, the man who will willingly defend the free world in the fringe areas is not the responsible citizen-soldier. The man who will go where his colors go, without asking, who will fight a phantom foe in jungle and moutain range, without counting, and who will suffer and die in the midst of incredible hardship, without complaint, is still what he has always been, from Imperial Rome, to sceptered Britain, to democratic America. He is the stuff of which legions are made.

That idea, first authored in 1953, was meant to warn against advocate a standing, professional, volunteer military, able to fight "wars of policy," rather than toe-to-toe Holocaust-like confrontations with Communisim. Now we find ourselves in the position of preparing that military to perform even larger and more complicated roles than that of the legions. In the concepts in this post and Wretchard's, US land forces might be the subtle soft-speakers to the Navy's big stick over the horizon.

Posted by Chester on October 22, 2005 2:57 PM to The Adventures of Chester